Critics have pointed out that videos made outside the UK will avoid this scrutiny, compromising the pilot’s effectiveness, though the long-term plans will rectify this by expanding to include all music videos, says David Austin, BBFC’s assistant director. The long-term aim is to warn consumers about the content they view online, and to give parents a degree of control over what their children are exposed to, by enabling filters to be set on home computers and mobile devices.

Though the pilot was announced this week, it was initially referred to by David Cameron in 2012, hot on the tails of Rihanna’s infamous S&M single. S&M was a crass, turgid song that came with an equally turgid video, abundant with ball gags, blow-up dolls and fetish wear. The video was banned in 11 countries and provoked the tide of debate Rihanna and her label were no doubt angling for. I was part of this tide, bored by raunch pop’s rote form of rebellion and concerned that the pornification of pop was having a harmful impact on young viewers – particularly girls.

Object is one of three organisations in charge of the Rewind&Reframe project, which lobbied the government to bring in age certificates for online music videos. Rewind&Reframe aims to challenge sexism and racism in videos, which is undeniably important, but Object does not speak for all feminists. As a sex-positive feminist, for example, I am pro-porn and support the sex-work industry. Object campaigns against these things. Why should we rely on an activist group that believes in censorship to advise the government on how to police pop?

Holly Combe, a member of Feminists Against Censorship, shares these concerns. “Ratings could seem pretty harmless in the first instance. After all, straightforward content notes can help people with PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] decide whether an article is likely to be triggering. However, my fear is that children will end up being denied the opportunity to access material that is actually educational, or gives them a wider and more inclusive view of the world.”

The BBFC’s 2014 report found that parents felt music videos should be subject to guidelines stricter than the ones currently in place for films, the rationale being that viewing a music video was an intense, graphic viewing experience, “likened to ‘watching a film concentrated into three minutes’”, and that its pop-star protagonists are aspirational, with influence over young people. “We will take into account that because a music video is short and self-contained, material is less likely to be justified by context and more likely to cause offence than in, say, a 90-minute feature film,” says David Austin. “For these reasons, and in line with the public’s concerns, we will take a cautious approach to the classification of music videos.”

Caution should be the key word here. Austin says that parents aren’t just concerned about sexual imagery – they are also worried by scenes involving drug use, violence and self-harm. “It taps into parents’ fears and anxieties around bad behaviour and desensitisation to violence,” he explains. What constitutes bad behaviour, though? Christian and Catholic parents may decide this includes rejecting religious orthodoxy, as Madonna did in Like a Prayer. Homophobic parents may decide that homosexuality, as depicted in Macklemore’s Same Love, is “the glamorisation” of “inappropriate” behaviour. Combe agrees. “Children need to be able to learn about serious issues such as sexuality, but this won’t happen if the people in charge have a conservative agenda. I suspect that such ratings are an attempt to engineer innocence, and that children will end up in a worse position in practice,” she says.

Recent news regarding Ira Sachs’ new film Love Is Strange is a prime example of how age classification systems can smother art under bigoted and prudish anxieties. The film, which stars John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as elderly gay newlyweds, contains no sex, nudity, violence or drug use – yet the Motion Picture Association of America has decided it should be subject to an R rating. Why? We can only assume the MPAA considers the lives of queer old people as a threat to young, impressionable minds. Amazon offers another example of filtering gone wrong. In 2009, the retailer’s effort to protect readers from “adult” literature meant lesbian, gay, feminist and sex-positive books were de-ranked and wiped from search results, denying readers access to important books and affecting authors’ earnings.

If I had seen examples of my own queerness in the young adult-focused pop videos, films and books I was exposed to as a youth coming of age in the 1980s, I would have come out of the closet sooner. It was the lack of queerness on my family’s TV that meant I had no idea why the lesbian subtexts in the gothic, starry, fairytale video for Stay, the 1992 No 1 hit single by Shakespears Sister, elicited such a potent reaction in me. I had no language for my queerness, and since it was never made explicit in the pop I saw, I folded away my desires, unable to understand them.

Pop can help young people discover what they need and who they desire. Pop, like life, isn’t always black and white. How would the gloriously intense video for feted south London artist FKA Twigs’ Papi Pacify fare under this new pilot scheme? In the video, Twigs meets the viewer’s gaze face-on, while in the embrace of a man who has one hand around her throat, using his other hand to dip his fingers in and out of her mouth. The video is intensely erotic, disturbing even, and rife with ambivalence – is the embrace violent, loving or somewhere in between? Is Twigs a passive captive, or a grand orchestrator? Everything is inferred and nothing is revealed: no nudity, no criminal violence. This ambiguity is key to the video’s power, says co-producer Tom Beard. “It’s meant to ask questions of the viewer – who’s got the control in this relationship? Who’s got the power?”

Papi Pacify reveals how nuanced and complex the music video medium can be, especially when artists and producers avoid raunch cliches. Beard is ambivalent about the pilot scheme. He believes videos – particularly the big US pop and hip-hop affairs – are increasingly gratuitous in relation to sex, but he is wary that age certification is a harbinger of censorship. He also points out that video budgets frequently rely on high-profile product placement, such as Nicki Minaj’s Pills N Potions video, which was effectively one big advert for Beats by Dr Dre. If pop videos, which look set to be in for stricter regulations, are essentially adverts, shouldn’t the advertising industry be under greater scrutiny, too?

When Minaj released the artwork for her Anaconda single – a striking image of a squatting Minaj in a hot pink thong, squatting on the floor with her ample backside facing the camera – she did so with a message. Using her Instagram account, she preceded the artwork with a series of photos featuring thin, white, tanned, bikini-clad, FHM-ready models, bearing the caption “acceptable”. Her own bikini selfie, which spawned 1,000 memes, was captioned “unacceptable”. Minaj, who revels in her autonomy and has spoken forcefully against sexism in the music industry, was using her image to make an explicit statement about the double standards that occur where race and sexuality intersect: why are white, slim, semi-nude bodies ubiquitous while voluptuous black female bodies are considered a threat? These conversations, about the expression of sexuality and the biases at work when we police it, must happen publicly and should involve everyone – not just state-appointed censors.

Pop is meant to be provocative. It serves, with varying success, to push at our weak spots, to play with our taboos and to amplify our desires. It is a space where fantasy and exaggeration should be encouraged. And a healthy pop culture recognises that people – especially women – are not monolithic. Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl may praise New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde as an alternative to “stripper pop”, but there is room for pop to be many things: coy, wholesome, bitchy, smart, raunchy, prim, provocative, political, queer.